Tuesday, June 13, 2017

JSF aka JavaServer Faces is a component based MVC framework that's part of Java EE and is one of the oldest Java MVC frameworks that's still supported and actively used (version 1.0 was released in 2004).

Over time, Java EE itself has grown considerably and as such the resources required to maintain and evolve Java EE have grown as well. Now Oracle has indicated at several occasions that it just doesn't have the resources required for this, and for most constituent specs of Java EE it can do at most small updates, but in other cases can't do any updates at all.

Since the community has largely taken over JSF already, should this perhaps be made more formal by actually letting the community (individual, foundation, or even representative small company) take the lead in developing the next version of JSF? In such scenario, the existing JSF versions (2.3 and before) and their respective TCKs would stay with Oracle, but JSF.next (i.e. JSF 2.4 or 3.0) would be fully specified, implemented and released by the community (OmniFaces in particular, with possibly the help of others).

Is a large and important spec such as JSF better off at a large and responsible, albeit resource constrained, organisation such as Oracle, or do you want OmniFaces to take over the spec lead role?
If you want, you can cast a vote in the poll below or leave a comment: